There Felton stayed, doing more aimless dribbling, and he did not start toward the basket until just five seconds remained. Then Duke guard DeMarcus Nelson jumped out to double-team him, and only then did Felton pass to David Noel.

But Noel rushed, fumbling the pass out of bounds as time expired. So North Carolina threw away its chance without even launching a shot and Duke escaped with a 71-70 victory.

"It was a play we ran before," Tar Heels coach Roy Williams said. "We had four different options. I really felt we were in good shape. But we didn't make the play."

Said Felton: "I should have taken it [to the basket]. It's a mistake I made."

Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said: "We thought they'd try to go to [forward Rashad] McCants or Felton. But we wanted them to use up some clock. You knock out some options if you get them to use seven or eight seconds [getting into the play]. Daniel did a great job of that."

Ewing did a great job all night, playing 39 minutes, scoring 15 points and enduring leg cramps.

But he was just one of the stars for the No. 7 Blue Devils (18-2, 8-2 Atlantic Coast Conference).

They got 18 points from guard J.J. Redick, who played all 40 minutes; 11 points and nine rebounds from forward Shelden Williams, who played 38; and a surprising 16 from Nelson, a freshman who played 29 off the bench.

Krzyzewski called Nelson "obviously our star [tonight]. His play was at a different level, and we needed that to win the game. In a game like this, you need something different. Great players have a tendency to cancel each other out, so you need someone to step up."

Center Sean May stepped up for North Carolina (19-3, 8-2 ACC), scoring 23 points and grabbing 18 rebounds. But the rest of the Tar Heels were exposed as pretenders.

For a long time North Carolina has appeared to be one of the teams that could derail Illinois' hopes for a national championship this season.

But the Tar Heels were undisciplined, in too much of a hurry and often looking as if they wanted to score six points on every possession.

North Carolina had 23 turnovers and 10 assists, and Felton had eight turnovers and three assists. McCants, their mercurial star, managed 11 points, went 1 of 8 on his three-pointers and 3 of 13 overall, and often moped, failed to hustle and looked uninterested.

The Tar Heels outrebounded Duke 43-28 and held the Blue Devils to 35.7 percent shooting while shooting 43.9 percent themselves. But they were too inconsistent to win."Handling the basketball and their guys making big plays was the key to the game," Williams said softly.

"Their pressure bothered us. I didn't think their pressure would bother us, but we had five different turnovers just throwing it from Point A to Point B, which was 10 feet away. We can't have 23 turnovers and be the kind of team that we want to be."